BizTechTalk

Sowing the Seeds (of Innovation)

Dan Keldsen interviewing Dr. Alex Pattakos and Elaine Dundon, of The Innovation Group based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico (www.SeedsOfInnovation.com and www.SeedsOfMeaning.com).

Does your organization, or for that matter, you, have fertile ground to plant the seeds of Innovation? Is it possible to innovate in the public sector? (hint, yes!) How does the drive to meet quarterly numbers drive out, or possibly, foster, innovation in a publicly held company? What is the process or processes that support sustainable innovation, and how can you find the beginning thread within your organization to fully embed innovation in yourself and your organization?

The organizational development, marketing, business and psychiatric backgrounds that Alex and Elaine bring to this discussion are well worth your time.

As comes up in nearly every conversation, every blog entry, or any other output you may see or hear from me, there is *absolutely* more to innovation than simply slapping a label on a product or company and stating a claim to innovation. Learn how to begin - the conversation starts now!

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Enterprise Search Grows Up

Search has been around for a long time (particularly text-based search, which is NOT the only search game in town folks!), and while much of the buzz these days is about tags, folksonomies, and Invisible Crowds (see prior podcast with Jack Jia), search technology in and of itself is experiencing a revolution!

The revolution brings usability across the board, to users, to administrators, and to content managers looking to get the most bang out of the content as they can. In this interview with Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO and Co-founder (http://searchdoneright.com/author/valdes) of Vivisimo (http://www.vivisimo.com/), we discuss what Vivisimo has been targeting to push Enterprise Search through it's next growth spurt.

We hit a number of topics that are my hot button topics - as a former hands-on IT guy, while I was happy to have usability figure heavily for end-users, inevitably any user interface for the administrators and implementors were the worst interfaces you've ever laid eyes on. Just because someone in IT is comfortable typing commands into a terminal, that doesn't mean that's their PREFERRED way of working. Anything that software companies can do to speed up time to deploy, time to maintain, and time to extend integration (think federated search - which we discuss here), and FINALLY Enterprise Search Grows Up!

I would love to hear your feedback on using Enterprise Search tools, from either the user or administrator point of view, and whether you are getting the flexibility you would like out of your search solution. Comment on the blog (www.BizTechTalk.com), or call in to my caller hotline at 781-268-0716 and leave a message for me!

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Chowda Chat - Catch my interview on Chowda Chat at beantownweb

As anyone who has followed my blog and listened to the podcasts I've done, I quite firmly believe in LinkedIn and other networking sites as to way to find interesting people, as well as to be found.

In the early weeks of LinkedIn rolling out their "Answers" functionality (ask a question of your network or the network at large and get an answer back), I was aiming to ask intriguing questions roughly every week, to test the functionality, as well as to see whether it drove interest in my blog, or in increasing connections within LinkedIn. It worked on both counts incidentally, and I'd recommend that as a way to increase your exposure for nothing more than the cost of your time in asking or answering questions on LinkeIn.

In one of those questions, I asked "Who should I interview next on the topic innovation?" and interestingly, a local Bostonian (Gene Babon) saw the question and flipped it around on me - asking if I'd like to be the interviewee instead. Well, how can I say no to a local networker and content creator?

Gene uses an e-mail interview format rather than audio, and so the responses can be found at his site, beantownweb. Great questions, and I sincerely hope, useful answers.

Go forth and read the interview! Feel free to comment, ask questions, etc. either on Gene's blog, or back here at BizTechTalk.com.

Thanks Gene for getting in touch, and turning the tables. A pleasure to participate!

Another tip for anyone networking, don't be afraid to reach out to people who are doing or have done work that really intrigues you. Make sure the pitch you make to connect identifies a real connecting point (not just "I want to expand my network"), and you should have a very high success rate. I certainly have, and have had some fantastic conversations as a result. Make it a connection for a reason, and you are likely to break through the noise.

Conversationally Interactive Audio and Video

My longtime colleague Tom Koulopoulos (blogging at The Innovation Zone) and I recently did a BlogTalkRadio interview with Howard Seibel, VP of Marketing from Veotag, where we were discussing trends in the way audio and video are produced, consumed, viewed, manipulated and mangled, from the beginning of TV to the new dawn of YouTube and beyond. Veotag provides an audio/video tagging platform, which allows internal bookmarks to be applied, syncing of PPT, embedding animation, and a number of other features. I had first stumbled onto Veotag back in January, via a Guy Kawasaki clip, and then in experimenting with veotag myself.

The BlogTalkRadio interview was audio only, but see below to experience a Veotagged audio clip. This allows you to easily bounce around in the file, rather than having to simply fast-forward or rewind blind. I'm planning to work back through my podcast archive and redo them to allow this style of interaction.

Timely enough, I finally watched a video tonight that I'd kept hearing about on the various blogs and newsletters I read, titled "Web 2.0... The Machine is Us/ing Us." Something about the title and the buzz going, had initially kept me from watching it, but I've finally experienced the video, and it is quite something. (Not quite at the same level, I had avoided reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell for a year or two, and wow, wish I hadn't waited to read that book. Old hypertrend avoidance habits die slowly though!)

Take a peek below...

Very interesting, and nicely done! I remember when we were doing some video editing in the very early days of my work at Delphi Group, and a fellow who was a professional video editor and producer was assisting us, with his in home (a large home, mind you) studio full of literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. This was only 10 years ago. The tools have radically changed...

But that's not my focus. So YouTube and consumer-generated media, and the tools that enable this are all fantastic pieces of technological stuff by themselves. But who cares? I've gotten to a discussion over on IT Toolbox, that certain types of content, as well as certain sites still don't truly provide the conversations and interaction that *I* am looking for.

Take a look at the clip below - it's the same as the original above, but with conversation overlaid on it, rather than below it (YouTube comments don't travel with the embedded version - but jump to YouTube and you'll see my point).

Now I'll admit that the commentary over the top of the video is in this case, very annoying - but the early stages of experimentation, or innovation, well, they aren't necessarily pretty folks! But having such comments (if they were USEFUL comments that is), could provide an important, conversational dialog OVER TIME, and IN CONTEXT, with the existing audio and video. Very interesting - clearly much work to be done, but this is an intriguing direction to me.

The Revolution Will Be... well, Revolutionary... *and* Evolutionary...

Re: In praise of a blank page

I receive the occasional e-mail announcing new "Lenses" (semi-structured web pages) from the fine folk at Squidoo from time to time, and bit on the hook tonight.

Seth Godin (marketing guru, has had a nice run of 7 books, and seems to just burst with ideas that sprout as soon as they hit the soil) is the man behind Squidoo, and so I rapidly latched onto one of his Lenses (anyone can author these, it's a nice platform, feature rich, and easy to use - different than a blog, but Web 2.0 in look and feel) and stumbled back onto his blog...

The most recent entry was titled "In praise of a blank page" - which is a great eye-catcher/attention-getter, as at least for me, it spawned thinking about tying the fear of blank pages into the mind killer that it can be for idea generators, painters, musicians, writers, etc.. But no, he's talking about a friend's book cover that seems was so inappropriate (mediocre) that leaving it blank would've been a better approach. I could easily see that happening...

But what REALLY caught my eye - his riff on refusing to ship/create unworthy products. He's been discussing making remarkable products, services, etc. for years now, and there is plenty of life left there - but the final paragraph is what got me, as it takes me back to one of the most interesting podcast interviews I've done so far, with Matthew E. May at Aevitas, and discussing his book titled "The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation."

Seth discusses kanban, which in a Japanese car factory, gave workers permission to stop the entire assembly line to fix a problem, no matter how big or small. The counterintuitive piece there is that in giving that power to any worker to push the big red button that grinds everything to a halt, production doesn't drop through the floor (overall) as you might expect, but that quality goes up, process times shrink, workers feel more empowered, and improvements pile on top of each other so subtly that no one notices (particularly outside the company) how much improvement has piled up until WHAM, it looks like INNOVATION (Big I) from the outside, and people wonder what happened.

Correction! (on Friday, April 6)

Just received word from Matthew E. May - updating me live from a plane before the "all cells off" call, who was TXT MSGD by a friend (I'd guess Ralph Bernstein, at Productivity Press - as Seth has made the correction now as well) about this post...

Seems both I (definitely) and Seth (yep) confused the terminology here. It should be Andon, not Kanban that we're talking about.

I'll drop in the correction here, straight from Matthew:

Kanban is something Toyota borrowed from the US grocery industry. It's a request. It means "sign card." It's what makes Just In Time work. Grocery markets and bakeries need fresh produce and run on a JIT basis. Toyota saw how it worked in the 50s and used it. It's a customer request essentially. When you go to the store and see the "Out of stock, Time to reorder" card...that's a kanban. In a Toyota plant no work is performed until the Kanban is empty and calls for it. It's a pull system.

Andon refers to stopping when there's a problem and dates back to Sakichi Toyoda's quest to build a loom that would automatically stop when a thread broke. Whenever something goes wrong you pull the andon cord. In newer plants now it's a Dell flatscreen that goes to a team leader's BlackBerry. But the line doesn't stop. Unless the problem can't be fixed by the next station. It's a call for help. You never want to stop the line if possible. It works like the stop cord on a bus. The bus stops at the next stop, or safest spot if it's an emergency. The andon is pulled thousands of times a shift...but line rarely stops. Heck, there's a Camry coming off the line every 57 seconds!

So... sorry about that folks, slight (ok, large - or larger than I'd like at any rate - the dangers of blogging at midnight) mixup in the terminology here, but the underling point remains the same, planned or unplanned disruptions will happen in your business, quickly responding and adapting is the key. Allowing and encouraging workers to acknowledge and fix problems as they happen (within the stop points Matthew describes above), constantly, always, is the way to keep the system and it's output not just running in the short-term, but continuously improving over the long-term as well. Always much to learn here - and I'm certainly not a Lean expert!

And now that the correction has been made, if you are interested in Lean Thinking, and need some definitions to grab onto, you may want to grab a copy of LeanSpeak (available as ebook or hardcopy - Seth would be so proud!). There is also of course the Lean Enterprise Institute, across the river from me in Cambridge, MA, which has quite the collection of Lean books, training, seminars, workshops, a thriving community, and more!

Thanks Seth, for bringing me back to those concepts, and raising them once more, in your classic attention getting style, and Matthew, thanks again for doing the interview with me (and supplying the correction!). Great conversation, and a great, easy to understand book. We could all use more of both.

Predictions in the air (Baynote via Mashable)

Synchronicity? Irony? Just posted the interview with Jack Jia of Baynote today, and a blog I recently stumbled onto from the Web 2.0 world, Mashable, has a brief link/description about Baynote, which came from a brief article/review over at VentureBeat. Initially became aware of this thru the latest craze in social software, twitter. Still trying to determine how best to tap into the twittersphere, but worth taking a look at. Realtime voyeurism - sustainable? Nonetheless, interesting conversations happening on twitter, get it while it lasts! Find me at http://twitter.com/dankeldsen

Powering The Long Tail with Invisible Crowds

When do communities become crowds? When do crowds become mobs? What makes any of these smart or dumb, loud or silent, useful or painful?

What is "The Long Tail" (www.longtail.com - blog for the book by Chris Anderson) and how is it changing the way people find information and interact with it? Is you website built for people to "bowl alone" or for the Invisible Crowds scampering about, to help each other by exposing the information/products they've successfully found?

Emergent behavior and automatically adapting systems are clearly changing the way that search and navigation can and will be done - and the revolution is at hand!

This is an interview between Dan Keldsen (www.BizTechTalk.com) and Jack Jia, CEO of Baynote (www.baynote.com), a search and navigation solution provider.

Are you using Baynote or other similar systems, tying in Web 2.0 directly into the operations of your marketing/sales engine? Leave some commentary here, trackback from your own blog, or call me at 781-268-0716 and leave some audio commentary, which I will post back to the blog, and continue this conversation!

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One Day to New Roof?

This will be short - just reading in the Boston Globe tonight, about a new trend washing across the US, with roofing services that will drop a large enough roofing crew to strip and redo your roof in a single day. Wow - having just had the pleasure of having my roof replaced last year (sideways rain over a week = not good, particularly with a 20-25 year old roof with vertically cracked, manufacturer defect shingles), this is pretty amazing.

Now, innovation is so frequently focused on a new product being delivered, and New Product Development (or NPD), gets a HUGE proportion of "innovation limelight" - but what about services? I hope to not experience having a roof redone any time soon, but apparently these services, like many in the housing/building industry (houses being built TO spec [yours], rather than ON spec [in hope of selling to someone, sometime soon] - AND faster, better, cheaper, higher margins, greater predictability, etc.), are significantly changing the landscape (pun not intended), and taking the true "professionals" to a much higher playing field.

Mr. Roof is one company providing the "one day roof" - these folks and their competitors aren't everywhere just yet, but the wave is coming - keep an eye out.

Don't forget - innovation comes in many shapes and flavors - don't obsess with PRODUCT innovation only, services and combined product/service innovations (think iPod, iTunes Music Store, iTunes and an ecosystem) are powerful as well.